This free email marketing tool can make your life easier

Small business owners are always on the lookout for a good email marketing tool that will greatly simplify their job. It’s often the case that a business owner will invest a great effort to get an email list going and then drop the ball by not engaging it regularly.

Any email marketing tool that can simplify and speed up newsletter creation is a welcomed edition to our bag of small business tricks – especially when it’s free.

I took Revue for a test drive the other day and really liked what I found. It has a free level for up to 200 subscribers, and honestly, even the monthly paid levels aren’t bad:

$5 for 1500 subscribers

$8 for 3000 subscribers

$10 for 4500 subscribers

$15 for 6000 subscribers

$19 for 5500 subscribers

For bigger companies, unlimited team members can get access to the account and you can have up to 10,000 subscribers.

By the way, to give you a little of the back story, Revue was founded by Martijn de Kuijper of the Netherlands as a side project. He created a minimum viable project in about four weeks and launched it on ProductHunt. Within two weeks he had more than 2,000 registered users. He tells the whole tale in this blog.

Creating a curated content newsletter with Revue is so simple, you’ll be up and running in minutes. Let me give you the basics.

You create an account by signing on through one of your social media platforms. For my test, I used my Twitter account. The account your select, by the way, becomes your first source of curated articles to include in your newsletter. You can add a wide range of other content sources, including RSS feeds.

Once you’re logged in, you press “create” and you’re presented with a template that has your basic information filled in. If you sign in with Twitter, for example, it will pick up your profile photo and your biographical paragraph. You can edit most of this information as you’re working on your email newsletter.

Putting content into your newsletter is as simple as selecting the source in the right-hand column, clicking on the article you want to include, and dragging it into your template. You can add other elements – body and headline type, for example – to get your newsletter looking just the way you want it. Once you have your newsletter ready, you can schedule it to send.

For your mailing list, you can import from Mailchimp, import via a CSV file, paste addresses in, or manually add subscribers. You can also “invite” people to subscribe who follow you on Twitter, Facebook, or are in your Gmail contacts.

In many ways, Revue is like the love child of Paper.li and Flashissue, if you’re familiar with those social media/email marketing tools. Paper.li automatically creates daily “newspapers,” which can be used as email newsletters or even website content. Flashissue is a Gmail plugin with a drag-n-drop interface similar to Revue’s. If you’re a Gmail power user, you’ll appreciate how it works. They each have their strengths – and slightly different purposes – but for hand curating a newsletter on your own schedule, you should definitely spend some time working with Revue.